Agree that dollars are not the ideal measure of utility, primarily because of of diminishing marginal returns as you get more wealthy. But they are pretty good for the majority.
Appealing to a right to an egalitarian "family dinner time" is also not terribly convincing. There are plenty of rich people who don't care much about family dinner time. There are plenty of poor who would eagerly spend half their day's wages to make it home on time.
Also, I'm not sure I buy the whole no competition argument regarding highways. The competition are the non-toll highways and driving on streets. There are several free options, and a paid option. The paid option has to compete against the free ones by setting a price that corresponds to the value it provides. If all roads were a toll road, then that would be a monopoly and a broken market, but this one seems okay.
I don't think that's fair. I'm not making an emotional appeal. I'm making (or attempting, at least) a rational one.
You can put it in diminishing marginal value terms, but I'm basically saying the same thing with fewer assumptions. Family time (or TV time or whatever) is an example to demonstrate that utility does not scale with money.
On the whole poor people commuting enjoy their free time, pleasant commutes and the other things at stake just as much as rich people. That's a fairly intuitive point.
Given that, the price that does not correspond to the value it provides^, inasmuch as income is unequally distributed. It corresponds to the wealth of the person making a decision and the value it provides.
The value of the fast lane is fairly evenly distributed between commuters. Everyone wants to get home. Everyone hates traffic. There are differences, but they're not huge on average.
What isn't evenly distributed is income. Therefore the sorting that this mechanism does is a little bit of utility based sorting and a lot of income based sorting.
If income was more even, there would be an argument for such a system. Given the actual distribution, the system is probably utility destroying.
Tolls are just a revenue raising mechanism, not an efficient allocation one.
I see your point now. I think you could go further with it. Arguably, a poor person who has never been on an airplane would get far more "utility" from a flight on a private jet than someone who flies every day. So one could argue (a stretch), that the poor, and not the rich, should ride that toll road if it would increase total happiness more.
But that seems ridiculous, and I think the issue here is that we're conflating capitalism with utilitarianism. Utilitarianism strives to maximize utility, i.e., total happiness. Capitalism strives for efficient use of scarce resources. They often overlap, but they are fundamentally different concepts.
Going back to the example, I buy your argument that tolls are a crude way of maximizing utility. However, they are a good way of putting a scarce resource (fast commuting time) to economic use.
A lot of liberal market ideas (Smith, Ricardo, etc) are essentially utilitarian. That is, they use utilitarian arguments to prove their points, so they're basically tied into the same assumptions. Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage is pure utilitarianism, and is the classical economics "proof" that trade is efficient. To this day, the most important theory of trade.
Efficiency in economic theory is almost all utility efficiency. The If not, what does efficiency? I guess you could say that in this case it's about maximizing revenue from willing payers. That's ok, but calling it efficiency is misleading.
When you say putting a scarce resource to its (most productive) use, what do you mean if not the enjoyment and benefit of its users?
Incidentally, there is a cool example of an artificial market for allocating food to US food banks. It uses a highly. Manipulated fake currency, with negative pricing and competitive bidding to improve "efficiency." The trick to making it work was all about being willing to define utility in non monetary terms.
Stating efficiency in dollar terms can lead to circular logic.
Utilitarians have struggled for decades to properly define "utility". The approach Bentham took (the father of utilitarianism) is completely different from John Stewart Mills, also a giant in utilitarianism. "Utility" is a far more vague concept than "efficiency".
Maximizing efficiency is less complex than utilitarianism. Capitalism strives for efficient allocation of resources based on supply and demand, i.e., what people have and what people want, it makes no promises on maximizing total happiness or equitable distribution.
For a utilitarian "putting a scarce resource to its (most productive) use" would indeed be to provide the maximum amount of enjoyment. But for a capitalist, it's simply the amount that someone is willing and able to pay for it.
I know some free market proponents use utilitarian ideas to make their point, and there is overlap, but they are a bad fit. Utilitarianism is a moral theory based on maximizing total good. Capitalism is an economic system that seems to have worked more than most other systems. There are moral arguments for capitalism, but they are based on individual freedom, not collective happiness.
> There are plenty of poor who would eagerly spend half their day's wages to make it home on time.
How does that not drive a person insane? Let's assume an 8 hour workday (so this would be a $10/hour job). How would you feel if you knew that after working your first 4 hours of the day, you basically aren't making any more money for the next 4 hours: all the money you make from that point on will be spent on getting home early. Why not just go home after your first 4 hours? You'll be home even earlier than when you take the $40 toll road, and you bring home the same amount of money for half the hours worked?
It seems to me that if you are regularly spending half your day's wages just to make it home on time, you are urgently in need of a different job (either closer to home or with different hours).
I'm surprised by your surprise, this insanity happens all the time. Parents miss baseball games, kids birthdays, and anniversaries because they are stuck in the office or at the plant. People work underpaid jobs for years with the hope that if they stick it out, they might get their reward. Parents sacrifice their entire lives to give their children a better shot.
The world is tough and trade-offs between time, money, and future opportunity are constantly being made at every income level.
Appealing to a right to an egalitarian "family dinner time" is also not terribly convincing. There are plenty of rich people who don't care much about family dinner time. There are plenty of poor who would eagerly spend half their day's wages to make it home on time.
Also, I'm not sure I buy the whole no competition argument regarding highways. The competition are the non-toll highways and driving on streets. There are several free options, and a paid option. The paid option has to compete against the free ones by setting a price that corresponds to the value it provides. If all roads were a toll road, then that would be a monopoly and a broken market, but this one seems okay.